Laurel Leff

Associate Professor

Laurel Leff is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northeastern University. She was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald and an editor with American Lawyer Media Inc. and The Hartford Courant. She teaches undergraduate courses in news writing, media law, magazine writing and legal reporting, and graduate courses in reporting, nonfiction writing and the First Amendment. Leff is also the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University, and the associate director of Northeastern’s Jewish Studies Program in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Her book, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. Buried by The Times was selected as the best media history book by the American Journalism Historians Association and the best history book by ForeWard Magazine. Professor Leff has spoken frequently on the topic at historical societies, museums, synagogues, associations and universities.

Her other scholarly publications include: “Jewish Victims in a Wartime Frame: A Press Portrait of the Nuremberg Trial,” chapter in Gerald Herman, Debra Kaufman, James Ross and David Phillips, ed., From the Protocols of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging The Media, the Law and The Academy, London: Vallentine Mitchell (2006); “News of the Holocaust: Why FDR Didn’t Tell and the Press Didn’t Ask,” Hakirah: A Journal of Jewish and Ethnic Studies, 2(2006: 31–62; “‘Liberated by the Yanks’: The Holocaust as An American Story in Postwar News Articles,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 40 (Fall, 2003: 407–30); as well as several book reviews. She is currently researching the response of American elites to pleas to rescue European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s.

Leff has a master’s in the study of law from Yale University and a master’s in communications from the University of Miami. She received an A.B. from Princeton University with a major in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

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